"I thought you had a taboo against the Globe," he said to Violet. "How did you happen to go there?"

"John went while I was in New York," she explained.

[Illustration: "Don't you know that that was Rose Aldrich?"]

"He's--well, a regular fan, you know. He hasn't missed a show there in years. And he was _too_ queer and absent-minded and fidgety for words, when I came back. I thought a bank must be going to fail, or something.

And when he said, after dinner last night, that he felt like going to a musical show, of course I said I'd go with him. And when I found it was the Globe--he already had tickets--I was too--kind and sorry for him to make a fuss. Well, and then she came out on the stage, and I knew what it was all about."

"Where did you sit?" Jimmy asked.

"Fifth row," said John.

Violet hadn't got the bearing of Jimmy's question. "Oh, you couldn't mistake her," she said, "any more than you could in this room, now."

"Do you mean," John asked, "that she might have recognized us?"

"They can't," said Violet, "across the footlights,--can they?"

Jimmy nodded. "In a little theater like that," he said, "anywhere in the house. But it seems she didn't recognize you."

"Look here!" said Violet. "Don't you know, in your own mind, just as well as that you're standing there, that that was Rose Aldrich?"

Jimmy dropped down into a big chair. "Well," he said, "I'm willing to accept it as a working hypothesis."

"You men!" said Violet.

Dinner was announced just then, and the theme had to be dismissed until at last they were left alone with the dessert.

"What breaks me all up," Violet burst out, abandoning the pretense of picking over her walnuts, and showing, with a little outflung gesture, how impatient she had been to take it up, "what breaks me all up is how this'll hit Frederica. She just adores Rodney and she's been simply wonderful to Rose--for him, of course."

Neither of the men said anything, but she felt a little stir of protest from both of them and qualified the last phrase.

"Oh, she liked her for herself, too. We all did. We couldn't help it.

But you haven't any idea, either of you, of even the beginning of what Frederica did for her--steered her just right, and pushed her just enough, and all the while seeming not to be doing a thing. Freddy's such a peach at that! And she's been so big-hearted about it; never even _felt_ jealous. If it had been me, and I'd adored a brother like that, and he'd gone off and fallen in love with a girl nobody knew, just because he saw her in a wrestling-match with a street-car conductor, I'd have wanted, whatever I might have done, to--well, show her up. And yet, even after Rose had left him, for no reason at all, Freddy ..."

"You're just guessing at all that, you know," her husband interrupted quietly. "You don't _know_ a single thing about it."

"Well, what reason _could_ Rose have for leaving him?" she flashed back.

"Hasn't Rodney been perfectly crazy about her ever since he married her?

Has he ever _seen_ another woman the last two years? Or maybe you think he's been coming home drunk and beating her with a trunk-strap."

But John stuck to his guns. "You don't even know she's left him. The only thing you do know is that Bella Forrester met Frederica one day, about a week before Christmas, in the railway station at Los Angeles."

"Well, can you tell me any other reason," Violet demanded, "why Freddy should dash off alone to California, right in the middle of the holiday rush, without saying a word to anybody, and be back here in just a week; and not tell even _me_ what she'd been doing, or where she'd been, so that if Bella hadn't written to me, I'd never have known about it at all? Is there any way of explaining that, except by supposing that Rose had quarreled with Rodney and left him and that Freddy was trying to get her to come back?"

Neither of the men could offer, on the spur of the moment, the alternative explanation she demanded. Indeed it would have taken a good deal of ingenuity to construct one. It was safer, anyway, just to go on looking incredulous.

There was silence for a minute or two, then Violet burst out again. "And then, after all Freddy had done, for Rose to come back here to Chicago, with all the other cities in the country where it wouldn't matter what she did, and start to be, of all things, a chorus-girl! It's just a"--she hesitated over the word, and then used it with an inflection that gave it its full literal meaning--"just a _dirty_ trick. And poor Freddy, when she knows ...!"

"I don't believe a word of it," said John Williamson. "I don't believe Doris Dane--if that's her name--is Rose, in the first place. And I don't believe Rose has had a quarrel with Rodney. But if she has, and if she's really there in that show ... Well, I know Rose--not so well as I'd have liked to, but pretty well--and I know she's a fine girl and I know she's square. And if I ever saw a girl in love with her husband, she was.

Well, and if she has done it, she's got a reason for it. Oh, I don't mean another woman or a trunk-strap, or any of the regular divorce court stuff. That's absurd, of course. And it may be, really, a fool reason.

But you can bet it didn't look like that to her. She wouldn't have done it, admitting it's what she's done, unless she felt she had to."

"Oh, yes," said Violet, "I expect she's feeling awfully noble about it, and I'll admit she was in love with Rodney. And that makes it all the worse! If she'd fallen in love with some other man and run off with him--well, that isn't pretty, but it's happened before and people have got away with it. But this running away on account of some silly idea that she's picked up from that votes-for-women mother of hers, running away from a man like Rodney, too, just makes you sick."

Her husband didn't try to answer her, except with a regretful sigh. He recognized in the stinging contempt of his wife's words, the voice of their world. If Doris Dane of the sextette were really Rose--and in the bottom of his heart, despite his valiant pretense, he couldn't manage more than a feeble doubt of it--she had committed the unforgivable sin.

Or so he thought, leaving out of his calculations one ingredient in the situation. She had done an unconventional thing for the sake of a principle!

"Well," said Jimmy Wallace after a while, heading the conversation away, as he was wont to do, from what might be an endless discussion of moral principles, "the purpose of this council of war is to decide what we are going to do about it. Are we going to tell Aldrich or his sister about the dressmaker who looks so much like his wife, and let them find out for themselves whether she is or not? Or are we going to make sure first by going back on the stage there and having a talk with her? Or are we just going to shut up about it--never have been to the Globe at all; or, in my case, never to have noticed the resemblance?"

"On the chance, you mean," John inquired, "that Rodney and Frederica never find out at all? How much does that chance amount to?"

"Well," said Jimmy, "the show's in its fourth week, and the story hasn't got into the papers yet. So the chances are now it won't. And you're about the only person in your crowd that makes a practise of going to the Globe. If you haven't heard any rumors it probably means that you two are the only ones who know, so far. People who knew her before she was married may have recognized her, to be sure, but they aren't likely to go around either to Aldrich or to Mrs. Whitney with the story. Of course there's always a big margin for the unforeseeable. But even at that, I think you might call it an even chance."

"That's what I vote for then," said John, "shut up."

"I certainly don't want to go back on the stage and talk to Rose," said Violet, "and I simply couldn't make myself tell either Rodney or Frederica. It would be just too ghastly! But there's another thing you haven't thought of. Suppose they both know already. I've got an idea they do."

This was a possibility they hadn't thought of, but the more they canvassed it, the likelier it grew.

"He acts as if he knew," Violet said, "now I come to think of it. Oh, I can't tell exactly why! Just the way he talks about her and--doesn't talk about her. And then there's Harriet. She came home from Washington and stayed three days with Frederica and then went away again. She kept house for him while Rose was laid up, and why shouldn't she be doing it now, except that she's perhaps spoken her mind a little too freely and Rodney doesn't want her around? There'd be no nonsense about Harriet, you could count on that."

"It would be like Rose," said John, "to tell him herself. It wouldn't be like her, when you come to think of it, to do anything else."

"Oh, yes, she'd tell him," said Violet. "If she had some virtuous woman-suffrage reason, she'd do more than tell him. She'd rub it in. Of course he knows. Well, what shall we do about that?"

"Same vote," said John Williamson; "shut up. Certainly if he knows, that lets us out."

But Violet wasn't satisfied. "That's the easiest thing, certainly," she said, "but I don't believe it's right. I think the people who know him best, ought to know--just a few, the people he still drops in on, like the Crawfords, and the Wests, and Eleanor and James Randolph; just so that they could--well, _not_ know completely enough; so that they wouldn't, innocently, you know, say ghastly things to him. Or even, perhaps, do them, like making him go to musical shows, or talking about people who run away to go on the stage. There are millions of things like that that could happen, and if they know, they'll be careful."

Her husband wasn't very completely convinced, though she expounded her reasons at length, and urged them with growing intensity. But he'd never put a categorical veto upon her yet, and it wasn't likely he'd begin by trying to, now.

As for Jimmy Wallace, he was really out of it. But he went home feeling rather blue.

CHAPTER XI

THE SHORT CIRCUIT AGAIN

It was, after all, out of that limbo that Jimmy had spoken of as the margin of the unforeseeable, that the blind instrument of Fate appeared.

He was a country lawyer from down-state, who, for a client of his own, had retained Rodney to defend a will that presented complexities in the matter of perpetuities and contingent remainders utterly beyond his own powers. He'd been in Chicago three or four days, spending an hour or two of every day in Rodney's office in consultation with him, and, for the rest of the time, dangling about, more or less at a loose end. A belated sense of this struck Rodney when, at the end of their last consultation, the country lawyer shook hands with him and announced his departure for home on the five o'clock train.

"I'm sorry I haven't been able to do more," Rodney said,--"do anything really, in the way of showing you a good time. As a matter of fact, I've spent every evening this week here in the office."

"Oh, I haven't lacked for entertainment," the man said. "We hayseeds find the city a pretty lively place. I went to see a show just last night called _The Girl Up-stairs_. I suppose you've seen it."